The Year’s Top
Short SF Novels is also available as an e-book for only $5.99 on the Kindle,
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and the Nook
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Short novels may well be the perfect length for science fiction. They are
movie length tales that resonate with moxie while exploring characters, new
worlds, and ideas. The stories in this unabridged audio collection are the
best-of-the best short science fiction novels published in 2010 by current and
emerging masters of this form.

“Return to
Titan,” by Stephen Baxter, is set in his Xeelee sequence. Michael Poole and his
father search one of Saturn’s moons for sentient life that would interfere with
their plans to build a gateway to the stars. In this year’s Theodore Sturgeon
Memorial Award winner for best short fiction, “The Sultan of the Clouds,” by
Geoffrey A. Landis, a terraforming expert is inexplicably invited to Venus by
the child who owns most of the planet’s habitable floating cities. “Seven Cities
of Gold,” by David Moles, tells the story of a Japanese relief worker charged
with tracking down the renegade Christian leader responsible for detonating a
nuclear device in an Islam-occupied North American city. In “Jackie’s-Boy,” by
Steven Popkes, an orphaned child befriends an uplifted elephant from the
abandoned St. Louis Zoo as they trek south across a sparsely populated North
America to find sanctuary. “A History of Terraforming,” by Robert Reed, involves
a young boy’s ambition to take up his father’s work of terraforming Mars and
then much of the solar system and discovers that much more than planets have
been altered. In “Troika,” by Alastair Reynolds, the lone survivor of a mission
that explored a massive alien object attempts to reveal what he discovered
despite the wishes of the Second Soviet Union. Set in the author’s S’hdonni
universe, “Several Items of Interest,” by Rick Wilber, the Earth ruling aliens
ask a human collaborator to help quell a human insurrection led by the
collaborator’s brother.